Discovering “Role Notes” in Shared Events
As a former user of The Master Genealogist (TMG), there are still moments—years after switching to RootsMagic—when I find myself missing certain features. One of those has always been the “memo” field.
In TMG, memo fields were incredibly flexible. You could enter detailed information and then build complex, customized sentences around that content. While RootsMagic offers a similar sentence-building structure, it doesn’t use the same “memo” concept. Instead, it encourages users to place that extra detail into the Notes field for each event. Since those notes can be included in narrative reports, the end result can feel very similar.
Recently, I’ve been making more use of shared events—especially for census records—and I’ve found them to be incredibly useful for keeping families connected within a single event. Naturally, I wanted the note attached to that shared event to appear in my narrative report.
But it didn’t.
That sent me searching for answers. I turned to the RootsMagic Community expecting to find a workaround… and instead, I discovered a feature I hadn’t fully appreciated before: Role Notes.
I’m sure I had seen that note field when sharing an event. But until now, I hadn’t realized just how powerful it could be.
Here’s how I used it:
- I returned to the shared event.
- In the “Shared With” list, I located the individual I was working on.
- I clicked the arrow ( > ) to open that person’s details.
- There, I found the Note field specific to that role and entered my information.
- I then generated a narrative report—with notes included—and this time… it worked.
The note attached to the role printed exactly as I had hoped.
It was one of those “aha” moments—simple, but incredibly useful.
I’ll admit, I might have discovered this sooner if I had watched more of the RootsMagic tutorials. But like many of us, I tend to learn best by doing (and occasionally by getting stuck!). So I’m especially grateful to the RootsMagic Community for pointing me in the right direction.
If you’ve been wishing for something like TMG’s memo fields when working with shared events, take a closer look at Role Notes. You might find they do exactly what you need.